1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical safety system, and, more particularly, to an improvement of an optical safety system provided with a safety scanner that senses an intruder within a protection area and outputs a sensing signal and a setting support device that generates area designation information designating the protection area.
2. Description of Related Art
An optical safety sensor is an area monitoring device which optically senses an intruder such as a person intruded into a protection area and outputs a safety control signal for emergently stopping a machine such as a machine tool or an industrial robot (e.g., JP 2009-296087 A and JP 2009-294734A).
For example, a safety scanner is an optical scanning area monitoring device provided with a light emitting part which emits detection light toward an object, a light receiving part which receives reflected light from the object and generates a light receiving signal, a distance calculation part which obtains a distance to the object on the basis of the light receiving signal, and a scanning part which causes the detection light to perform scanning in the circumferential direction around a rotation axis. Sensing of an intruder is performed by identifying the position of an object from the distance to the object and a scanning angle of the detection light and checking the identified position against a protection area.
Setting data which includes area designation information designating the protection area and measurement setting information designating a measurement condition is created using a setting support device. An information processing terminal such as a personal computer is used as the setting support device. The setting support device is capable of acquiring distance measurement information from the safety scanner and displaying the acquired distance measurement information on a screen. For example, in the setting support device, a scan image is displayed which includes a plurality of distance measurement information items obtained by performing scanning with the detection light, the plurality of distance measurement information items being represented as a plurality of distance measurement positions on a scanning plane of the detection light. Many distance measurement information items can be promptly grasped by displaying such a scan image.
However, in a conventional optical safety system, in order to check whether or not sensing of an intruder is appropriately performed with a protection area which is designated using the setting support device, it is necessary for the safety scanner to acquire distance measurement information after area designation information is transmitted to the safety scanner and setting data held by the safety scanner is updated. Thus, an editing operation for area designation information is disadvantageously troublesome.